Tina Franke talks about the hard time she went through after her daughter was killed and the sense of relief she experienced after learning an arrest had been made, 17 years after Christine's death.
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Benjamin Lee Holmes, 38, of Orlando, was arrested in November and charged with the 2001 killing of Christine Franke.(Photo11: CONTRIBUTED BY ORLANDO POLICE DEPARTMENT)

INDIAN RIVER COUNTY — On Oct. 21, 2001, Christine Franke, a 1994 Vero Beach High School graduate and University of Central Florida senior, was shot to death in the foyer of her Orlando apartment.

The homicide was never solved.

Fast-forward 17 years to Nov. 2, when Orlando police arrested 38-year-old Benjamin Lee Holmes less than 10 miles from the scene of the shooting. The first and only suspect, Holmes was charged with first-degree murder and armed robbery in Franke's death.

The arrest was made possible years later by the development and novel application of a DNA testing technique used by genealogy websites, police officials said.

For Franke's family, including her mother, Tina Franke, who still lives in Vero Beach, it was an emotional conclusion to a case that had driven out all but the faintest hope of closure.

No good leads

A friend discovered Franke's body laying in a pool of blood inside her apartment in Orlando’s Audubon Park, according to Holmes' arrest affidavit. The friend called 911 and tried to help her, but authorities determined she had died at the scene.

The cause: a single gunshot to the head.

The initial investigation yielded few clues. No one had seen or heard anything, apart from one neighbor who reported hearing "a loud … noise, like glass being broken," about 4:30 a.m., a police report said.

Christine Franke(Photo11: CONTRIBUTED PHOTO FROM FRANKE FAMILY)

Police speculated it began as a robbery. Early that morning Franke had finished her double shift at Cigarz, a restaurant at Universal Studio Orlando's CityWalk, and likely had several hundred dollars on her.

Investigators found a few fingerprints, a single shell casing and DNA evidence in some bodily fluids left at the scene.

The prints led nowhere. Forensics determined the bullet that killed Franke was fired from a .25-caliber handgun, but offered little else. The DNA sample was their best hope for a breakthrough, police said.

But a search through databases came up empty. Neither did detectives find a match with DNA collected from dozens of Franke's friends, family, co-workers, neighbors and acquaintances.

Routine checks against national law enforcement DNA databases over more than a decade never returned a match.

The case eventually went cold.

'Happy, fun girl'

"Christine was adventurous, crafty, full of life," Franke's mother said at the Vero Beach home on Brae Burn Circle to which she moved in 2009.

Tina Franke ran a finger over a framed picture of her daughter. "Just a happy, fun girl," she said.

The family moved to Vero Beach from Long Island, New York, in 1985, when Christine Franke was 9 years old, along with her brother, John, and sisters Barbara and Maria. She had proven a clever and precocious child; as an adult, those qualities matured into boldness, her family said.

Christine Franke(Photo11: CONTRIBUTED PHOTO FROM FRANKE FAMILY)

"She was a free spirit, and she was never afraid to try anything," sister-in-law Karen Franke said. "She would be the first to go out there surfing or riding a dirt bike, or whatever the case. She just loved life.”

She was good with kids, family members said. She was studying to be an elementary school teacher at UCF when she died, just two months from graduation.

'A hard, hard time'

When Tina Franke got the call that warm October evening, her first response was disbelief.

Family members rushed to Christine Franke's apartment, but officers wouldn’t let them through the door. Even when the friend who found her daughter confirmed the worst, Tina Franke couldn’t wrap her head around it.

“I was still in denial that it could be her. But it was,” she said, her eyes searching. “It was a hard, hard time.”

Time dulled the worst of the pain. But as the investigation stalled and the years wore on, Christine Franke’s absence loomed at every family get-together, every party, every holiday.

“We’re a big, Italian family, so we do everything together,” Karen Franke said. “It’s been, you know, really hard not having her part of the family the last 17 years.”

John Franke with his daughter, Christine Franke.(Photo11: CONTRIBUTED PHOTO FROM FRANKE FAMILY)

Her death was especially hard on her father, John Franke. “It just really kind of broke him,” Karen Franke said. “He was never the same.”

He died in November 2015, three years before the man police suspected of killing his daughter was finally caught.

‘A family forest’

Oversight changed hands three times, once when the first lead investigator was transferred and twice more when subsequent leads retired. Detective Michael Fields, the case’s fourth assigned lead, took over in 2012.

Fields contracted in 2015 with the Virginia-based Parabon NanoLabs to create a composite sketch of a suspect based on the DNA sample. The sketch garnered no leads, but the advances in genetics made Fields wonder whether the technology used by genealogy websites could be of use in his investigation.

The Snapshot Prediction Results Phenotype Report, generated by Parabon NanoLabs in 2015, of a suspect in the 2001 killing of Christine Franke based on DNA left behind at the scene.(Photo11: CONTRIBUTED FLYER FROM ORLANDO POLICE DEPARTMENT)

In May of this year, workers at Parabon ran the original DNA through GEDmatch, an open-data genealogy website and database composed of voluntarily submitted DNA samples.

The results were positive: three of the samples in the database were likely relatives of the suspect. Parabon’s experts, led by well-known genetic genealogist CeCe Moore, began the complex task of constructing family trees for each of the matches.

But there was a further problem.

“This was not a family tree,” Fields said. “This was a family forest.”

Investigators pored through files from more than 100 family members, using additional DNA samples from the family to narrow the field and eliminating possible suspects based on age, sex, relationship to the suspect and a dozen other factors.

Eventually, they landed on two people: Benjamin Lee Holmes and his brother. Both lived in Orlando, their listed address just 10 minutes down the road from police headquarters.

Authorities drafted warrants to obtain DNA from both men and began watching them. Undercover officers surreptitiously obtained a saliva sample from the brother using a discarded sports drink bottle, which did not yield a match to the DNA at the scene.

Flyer comparing the composite sketch with a 2004 mugshot of Benjamin Holmes. Holmes was arrested in November in connection with the 2001 killing of Christine Franke.(Photo11: CONTRIBUTED BY THE ORLANDO POLICE DEPARTMENT)

That left Holmes.

Police tracked him to a residence in the Orlando neighborhood of Rosemont North. Officers staking out the home saw Holmes smoke and discard a small cigar along with an empty beer can on the premises. The items were retrieved and tested.

It was a direct match, police said.

Exactly 17 years, three weeks and one day after Christine Franke's death, police arrested and charged Holmes with her murder.

'Overwhelmingly grateful'

Even with a suspect in hand, police said they've been so far unable to establish a motive in the case or discern a connection between Franke and Holmes.

When confronted with the evidence, Holmes denied involvement.

Despite a criminal record that included arrests for misdemeanor battery and other minor crimes, Holmes had never been required to give DNA to law enforcement. That was the main reason he’d eluded capture for so long, Fields said.

Suspects are typically only required to submit DNA samples when charged with felonies, he said.

News of the arrest sent a shockwave through the Franke family.

“We never thought that would come, so it was really emotional,” Karen Franke said. “It felt like closure.”

For Tina Franke, the overarching feeling was relief. Relief that the man suspected of killing her daughter was behind bars. Relief that he was still alive — and with him, the hope of justice.

“To be honest, I thought he was dead. He hadn’t surfaced for 17 years,” she said. “This is such a blessing for our family. … We are so overwhelmingly grateful for what (the investigators) have done for us.”

Police said it may be two years before the case goes to trial.

In the meantime, family members said they hope the technology that led to Holmes’ arrest can offer solace to others.

It has already been used to solve 14 other cases around the nation, police officials said.

Rogers is a breaking news reporter for TCPalm and FLORIDA TODAY.

Contact him at 727-978-2224, or eric.rogers@tcpalm.com. Follow him on Twitter @EricRogersFT.